Saturday, January 2, 2016

Shamir:Following the collapse of “Arab socialism”
and demise of the “Arab Spring,” is there any hope that the cradle of
civilization will become a superpower once more?

The
21st century is becoming increasingly characterized by the tragedies befalling
the Arab world. Tribal, ethnic, regional, religious and other forces are
fighting each other for power, while Arab states seem to be coming apart at the
seams or even completely crumbling. The historic rift between Sunni and Shi’ite
Islam remains as divisive as ever, and jihadists are gaining footholds
throughout Arab lands. They give rise to questions about their implications for
Arab states in the modern age.

Ever
since the Western world first burst into the Arab-Islamist sphere, more than
200 years ago, Arabs have been tormented by the question of why they – the
bearers of such a magnificent cultural heritage – now find themselves at such a
disadvantage. They have struggled to understand how they could possibly compete
with more developed nations.

To hope
to achieve this goal, they needed to address four challenges: First, to create
sovereign states with functioning national institutions that depend upon
cooperative citizens. Second, to develop the capacity to produce technology,
which would secure them a competitive position in the world economy. Third, to
handle Islam in a way that would instill values to bring society together –
like common identity and solidarity – but also neutralize the violent elements
that look to restore the ways of the past. Fourth, to shake off the
neocolonialist influence and involvement of superpowers, and act independently
in the international arena.

These
tasks became relevant when the Arab states gained independence, about midway
through the 20th century – or, at least, it seemed that they had started to
confront these challenges then. In some of the Arab states, revolutionary
Nasserist-Ba’athist regimes came to power, and they assumed these burdens. They
founded national institutions and created educational systems to indoctrinate
the people and enhance the individual’s affinity to the state. They
nationalized production, built industrial plants and sent the people to
universities, in the hope of advancing their country’s scientific and
technological capabilities. They called it “Arab socialism.”

Islam
was cultivated as a symbol, but the regimes themselves were secular and kept
the Islamic movement subdued. They dismantled the foreign military bases and
scrapped foreign military strategies like 1955’s Baghdad Pact, which established
METO – a treaty organization (modeled after NATO) that included Britain and
Middle Eastern states, but which was dissolved in 1979. The newly independent
Arab states sought to establish themselves collectively as a world power and
aligned with the African-Asian bloc; they labeled it a kind of “positive
neutrality.”

Knowledge deficit

The
Arab reality today is very different. The leaders’ glaring mistake was they
believed that in this region, “the societies might be weak, but the states are
strong.” It transpired that the systems of intimidation and enforcement did not
reflect strength, but instead weakness. When the upheavals began, and the
non-state factions became more powerful and began preaching a new reality, some
of the states collapsed, while others are struggling to maintain their
stability.

From
today’s perspective, it isn’t hard to explain the phenomenon. It seems that the
Arab states, to varying degrees, were hollow entities; their conceptual
frameworks were weak. They were created during the modern age and had no names
– because such entities did not exist prior to their establishment. The
classical Arabic lexicon did not include a word for “state” or “nation.” In its
place, the word meaning “dynasty,” or ruling family, was adapted for the
purpose. The concept of a nation became synonymous with the idea of a dynasty
that rises and falls. Thus, large swaths of the population backed the idea that
when the regime falls, the state is no more.

In the
West, the thinking tends to be that the toppling of an authoritarian regime
might lead to the establishment of a democracy. However, bitter experience has
shown that overthrowing the rulers prompts the whole system to collapse, and
then the alternative is chaos. This is also the root cause of the failure of
the youth that led the Arab Spring. It turned out that while it’s possible to
topple a dictator, the proper foundations for fostering democracy in the
aftermath – both conceptually and institutionally – were lacking.

There
is no escaping the conclusion that, at this stage, most Arab states can only
function with some level of stability under authoritarian regimes or traditional
monarchies. The challenge of creating nations similar to those in the modern
West has yet to be fulfilled.

Similar
failures have occurred on the economic front, too. True, there was economic
development in some Arab nations that led to prosperity and in some cases even
great wealth (Qatar, for example, is the richest country in the world in terms
of GDP per capita, while Kuwait is ranked fourth). Arab states need foreign
currency to import essential food items, but they don’t receive enough from the
selling of natural resources, tourism, people working overseas and, for Egypt,
from the Suez Canal.

Arab
products are barely represented in the global marketplace. Compare Egypt and
South Korea, where the economic conditions were similar when both nations
achieved independence. South Korea currently exports everything from high-tech
electronics to cars and boats: as a result, its economy is five times the size
of Egypt’s.

The
dizzying growth of the global economy is based primarily on knowledge, and
countries that cannot match the rate of development get left behind. In most
Arab countries, the level of scientific and technological know-how does not
meet the levels required to support advanced, innovative means of production. A
United Nations report in 2002, “Arab Human Development,” called this the
“knowledge deficit,” and determined that this was one of three factors
hindering development in the Arab nations. Knowledge in the Arab world is not
up to par because their schools and universities place too great an emphasis on
memorization and rote learning.

The
knowledge deficit stems from the fact that openness to the world is low among
Arab states. For example, the number of translated books in the Arab world is
exceedingly low: A 2003 UN report, “Building a Knowledge Society,” found that,
on average, only 4.4 translated books were published per million people between
1981 and 1985 in the Arab states, while the corresponding rate in Hungary was
519 books, and in Spain 920.

Even
when Arab states open up to the world and import technologies, the benefits are
limited. Global technologies become obsolete very quickly, so those not
participating in their production can’t develop effective alternatives.
Creativity and ingenuity are so critical these days, but these qualities are
lacking in the Arab world. And despite their extremely modern image, even the
Gulf states import technology from around the world and the locals have no stake
in production.

According
to the same 2003 UN report, all of the Arab states combined registered only 370
patents in the United States between 1980 and 2000, while Israel alone
registered more than 7,000 and South Korea registered over 16,000. The number of
researchers per million people in the Arab world sits at 300, while the global
average is 900. The result of all of this is that unemployment rates among
young people in the Arab world are among the highest on the planet – between 30
to 50 percent.

Failure to tackle radical Islam

Even
the clampdown on Islam in Arab countries did not work so well. Islamist
factions weren’t eliminated, despite numerous efforts to that end. Gamal Abdel
Nasser sent thousands of Muslim Brotherhood members to jail, as did other
nations. Yet comparing the demographics of Islamists at the end of the 20th
century and today shows a staggering rate of growth: In 2000, Islamist groups
were small, underground factions with limited capabilities; by 2015, they had
become large forces with military capabilities and cutting-edge weaponry, and
were firmly established throughout Arab lands. They challenge not only local
governments, but also the foreign regimes that support those governments. The
last 15 years have seen a series of mega-terrorist attacks throughout the world
– from the September 11 attacks in the United States to the recent massacre in
Paris. During the last five years alone, there has been a stark increase in the
number of casualties from Islamic terrorism in various nations – in some cases
up more than tenfold in comparison to previous years.

It’s
possible that the failure to deal with radical Islam also stems from the fact
that attempts to do so were always brutal. Not enough attention was paid to the
fact that Islamism (also known as Political Islam) is not only terrorism, but
that it represents first and foremost an idea – an idea that is very attractive
to many Muslims, especially during times of regional conflict and strife. Many
nations failed because they did not see the need to pose an alternative idea,
despite the fact that such an idea existed.

During
the first half of the 20th century, liberal, humanist and rational streams
appeared within Islam – streams that separated religion and state, and found
their own intellectual expression. Unfortunately, most Arab state regimes
rejected these ideas, choosing instead to embrace a combination that had the
worst of all options. The Arab nations could not find a courageous leader
capable of sparking the necessary transformation for repelling brutal Islamism
and creating a new order that marched with the times.

Also,
the aspirations of the first generations to achieve independence went
unrealized, and they were unable to prevent a situation in which the end of
colonialism would create a vacuum and space for foreign influence. The first
sign of this failure was already evident in the days of Nasser: He became the
hero of the Arab world when he expelled 10,000 British soldiers from their
bases in Egypt, but then quickly brought in 20,000 Soviet “military advisers”
(who Anwar Sadat later expelled, in 1972).

The
clear turning point was the Gulf War in 1991, when Arab armies fought as part
of a coalition commanded and led mostly by Americans, against an Arab leader
who was the “Arab bulwark” against Iran. And that’s how it continued: NATO
forces were employed against Muammar Gadhafi in Libya; the Iranians are making
excursions into Iraq and Syria, as are the Turks; the Russians are intervening
in the Syrian civil war on President Bashar Assad’s side; France is asking
fellow European Union states to aid in the fight against the Islamic State; and
the United States, which had seemingly retreated from the arena, is being
pulled back into the fray in both Iraq and Syria.

In Arab
states, the regional wars are fierce and the number of casualties over recent
decades has reached the millions. Huge waves of refugees are abandoning their
countries, fleeing from death and destruction. The refugees mostly express
utter despair for life in their homeland.

In a
bleak leader article regarding the state of the Arab world published in The
Economist (“The Tragedy of the Arabs,” July 5, 2014) , the writer laments the
fact that a “civilization that used to lead the world is in ruins,” and
declared that the Arab peoples are “in a wretched state.” The remarks call to
mind Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz, who was one of the first in Egypt to
express support for reconciliation with Israel. He said that peace was
justified because of the “need to rebuild civilization.”

Mahfouz
knew what he was talking about. There’s no doubt that developments in the
region affect Israel. It is a mistake to rejoice in the misfortunes of our
neighbors, and praise ourselves for being “the villa in the jungle,” as former
Prime Minister Ehud Barak once said. Our borders are not immune to the threats
of violence raging around us, and we can get involved in our neighbors’
well-being.

The author is a professor emeritus of
Middle Eastern History and former Israeli ambassador to both Egypt and Jordan.

The Tragedy of the Arabs. The Economist, July 5, 2014.A civilisation that used to lead the world
is in ruins—and only the locals can rebuild it.

A
THOUSAND years ago, the great cities of Baghdad, Damascus and Cairo took turns
to race ahead of the Western world. Islam and innovation were twins. The
various Arab caliphates were dynamic superpowers—beacons of learning, tolerance
and trade. Yet today the Arabs are in a wretched state. Even as Asia, Latin
America and Africa advance, the Middle East is held back by despotism and
convulsed by war.

Hopes
soared three years ago, when a wave of unrest across the region led to the
overthrow of four dictators—in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen—and to a clamour
for change elsewhere, notably in Syria. But the Arab spring’s fruit has rotted
into renewed autocracy and war. Both engender misery and fanaticism that today
threaten the wider world.

Why
Arab countries have so miserably failed to create democracy, happiness or
(aside from the windfall of oil) wealth for their 350m people is one of the
great questions of our time. What makes Arab society susceptible to vile
regimes and fanatics bent on destroying them (and their perceived allies in the
West)? No one suggests that the Arabs as a people lack talent or suffer from
some pathological antipathy to democracy. But for the Arabs to wake from their
nightmare, and for the world to feel safe, a great deal needs to change.

The blame game

One
problem is that the Arab countries’ troubles run so wide. Indeed, Syria and
Iraq can nowadays barely be called countries at all. This week a brutal band of
jihadists declared their boundaries void, heralding instead a new Islamic
caliphate to embrace Iraq and Greater Syria (including Israel-Palestine,
Lebanon, Jordan and bits of Turkey) and—in due course—the whole world. Its
leaders seek to kill non-Muslims not just in the Middle East but also in the
streets of New York, London and Paris. Egypt is back under military rule.
Libya, following the violent demise of Muammar Qaddafi, is at the mercy of
unruly militias. Yemen is beset by insurrection, infighting and al-Qaeda.
Palestine is still far from true statehood and peace: the murders of three
young Israelis and ensuing reprisals threaten to set off yet another cycle of
violence (see article).
Even countries such as Saudi Arabia and Algeria, whose regimes are cushioned by
wealth from oil and gas and propped up by an iron-fisted apparatus of state
security, are more fragile than they look. Only Tunisia, which opened the
Arabs’ bid for freedom three years ago, has the makings of a real democracy.

Islam,
or at least modern reinterpretations of it, is at the core of some of the
Arabs’ deep troubles. The faith’s claim, promoted by many of its leading
lights, to combine spiritual and earthly authority, with no separation of
mosque and state, has stunted the development of independent political
institutions. A militant minority of Muslims are caught up in a search for
legitimacy through ever more fanatical interpretations of the Koran. Other
Muslims, threatened by militia violence and civil war, have sought refuge in
their sect. In Iraq and Syria plenty of Shias and Sunnis used to marry each
other; too often today they resort to maiming each other. And this violent
perversion of Islam has spread to places as distant as northern Nigeria and
northern England.

But
religious extremism is a conduit for misery, not its fundamental cause (see article).
While Islamic democracies elsewhere (such as Indonesia—see article)
are doing fine, in the Arab world the very fabric of the state is weak. Few Arab
countries have been nations for long. The dead hand of the Turks’ declining
Ottoman empire was followed after the first world war by the humiliation of
British and French rule. In much of the Arab world the colonial powers
continued to control or influence events until the 1960s. Arab countries have
not yet succeeded in fostering the institutional prerequisites of democracy—the
give-and-take of parliamentary discourse, protection for minorities, the
emancipation of women, a free press, independent courts and universities and
trade unions.

The
absence of a liberal state has been matched by the absence of a liberal
economy. After independence, the prevailing orthodoxy was central planning,
often Soviet-inspired. Anti-market, anti-trade, pro-subsidy and pro-regulation,
Arab governments strangled their economies. The state pulled the levers of
economic power—especially where oil was involved. Where the constraints of
post-colonial socialism were lifted, capitalism of the crony, rent-seeking kind
took hold, as it did in the later years of Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak. Privatisation
was for pals of the government. Virtually no markets were free, barely any
world-class companies developed, and clever Arabs who wanted to excel in
business or scholarship had to go to America or Europe to do so.

Economic
stagnation bred dissatisfaction. Monarchs and presidents-for-life defended
themselves with secret police and goons. The mosque became a source of public
services and one of the few places where people could gather and hear speeches.
Islam was radicalised and the angry men who loathed their rulers came to hate
the Western states that backed them. Meanwhile a vast number of the young grew
restless because of unemployment. Thanks to the electronic media, they were
increasingly aware that the prospects of their cohort outside the Middle East
were far more hopeful. The wonder is not that they took to the streets in the
Arab spring, but that they did not do so sooner.

A lot of ruin

These
wrongs cannot easily or rapidly be put right. Outsiders, who have often been
drawn to the region as invaders and occupiers, cannot simply stamp out the
jihadist cause or impose prosperity and democracy. That much, at least, should
be clear after the disastrous invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003. Military
support—the supply of drones and of a small number of special forces—may help
keep the jihadists in Iraq at bay. That help may have to be on permanent call.
Even if the new caliphate is unlikely to become a recognisable state, it could
for many years produce jihadists able to export terrorism.

But
only the Arabs can reverse their civilisational decline, and right now there is
little hope of that happening. The extremists offer none. The mantra of the
monarchs and the military men is “stability”. In a time of chaos, its appeal is
understandable, but repression and stagnation are not the solution. They did
not work before; indeed they were at the root of the problem. Even if the Arab
awakening is over for the moment, the powerful forces that gave rise to it are
still present. The social media which stirred up a revolution in attitudes
cannot be uninvented. The men in their palaces and their Western backers need
to understand that stability requires reform.

Is that
a vain hope? Today the outlook is bloody. But ultimately fanatics devour
themselves. Meanwhile, wherever possible, the moderate, secular Sunnis who
comprise the majority of Arab Muslims need to make their voices heard. And when
their moment comes, they need to cast their minds back to the values that once
made the Arab world great. Education underpinned its primacy in medicine,
mathematics, architecture and astronomy. Trade paid for its fabulous
metropolises and their spices and silks. And, at its best, the Arab world was a
cosmopolitan haven for Jews, Christians and Muslims of many sects, where
tolerance fostered creativity and invention.

Pluralism,
education, open markets: these were once Arab values and they could be so
again. Today, as Sunnis and Shias tear out each others’ throats in Iraq and
Syria and a former general settles onto his new throne in Egypt, they are
tragically distant prospects. But for a people for whom so much has gone so
wrong, such values still make up a vision of a better future.

As pundits
and politicians stoked the recent shootings in California into an existential
threat; as French troops were deployed in Paris; as Belgian police locked down
Brussels, and US and Russian planes intensified air attacks in Syria following
yet another slaughter perpetrated in the name of the so-called Islamic State,
it was easy to lose sight of a central fact. Amid the bullets, bombs and
bluster, we are not only failing to stop the spread of radical Islam, but our
efforts often appear to contribute to it.

What
accounts for the failure of “The War on Terror” and associated efforts to
counter the spread of violent extremism? The failure starts with reacting in
anger and revenge, engendering more savagery without stopping to grasp the
revolutionary character of radical Arab Sunni revivalism. This revival is a
dynamic, countercultural movement of world-historic proportions spearheaded by
ISIS, (the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, also known as ISIL, or the Islamic
State of Iraq and the Levant). In less than two years, it has created a
dominion over hundreds of thousands of square kilometres and millions of
people. And it possesses the largest and most diverse volunteer fighting force
since the Second World War.

What
the United Nations community regards as senseless acts of horrific violence are
to ISIS’s acolytes part of an exalted campaign of purification through
sacrificial killing and self-immolation: Know
that Paradise lies under the shade of swords, says a hadith, or saying of the Prophet; this one comes from the Sahih al-Bukhari, a collection of the
Prophet’s sayings considered second only to the Qu’ran in authenticity and is
now a motto of ISIS fighters.

This is
the purposeful plan of violence that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the Islamic State’s
self-anointed Caliph, outlined in his call for “volcanoes of jihad”: to create
a globe-spanning jihadi archipelago that will eventually unite to destroy the
present world and create a new-old world of universal justice and peace under
the Prophet’s banner. A key tactic in this strategy is to inspire sympathisers
abroad to violence: do what you can, with whatever you have, wherever you are,
whenever possible.

To
understand the revolution, my research team has conducted dozens of structured
interviews and behavioural experiments with youth in Paris, London and
Barcelona, as well as with captured ISIS fighters in Iraq and members of Jabhat
al-Nusra (Al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria). We also focused on youth from
distressed neighbourhoods previously associated with violence or jihadi support
– for example, the Paris suburbs of Clichy-sous-Bois and Épinay-sur-Seine, the
Moroccan neighbourhoods of Sidi Moumen in Casablanca and Jamaa Mezuak in
Tetuán.

While
many in the West dismiss radical Islam as simply nihilistic, our work suggests
something far more menacing: a profoundly alluring mission to change and save
the world.

In the
West, the seriousness of this mission is denied. Olivier Roy, usually a deep
and subtle thinker, wrote last month in Le Monde that
the Paris plotters represent most who flock to ISIS; they are marginal misfits
largely ignorant of religion and geopolitics, and bereft of real historical
grievances. They ride the wave of radical Islam as an outlet for their nihilism
because it’s the biggest and baddest countercultural movement around. And how
else could one explain a mother who abandons her baby to die butchering
innocents in San Bernadino who never did her harm?

But the
worldwide ISIS revolution is hardly just a bandwagon for losers. Although
attacked on all sides by internal and external foes, the Islamic State has not
deteriorated to any appreciable degree, while rooting ever stronger in areas it
controls and expanding its influence in deepening pockets throughout Eurasia
and Africa. Despite recent White House reassurances, US intelligence tells us
that ISIS is not being contained.
Repeated claims that ISIS is being degraded and on the way to inevitable defeat
ring hollow for almost anyone who has had direct experience in the field. Only
Kurdish frontline combatants and some Iranian-led forces have managed to fight ISIS
to a standstill on the ground, and only with significant French and US air
support.

Despite
our relentless propaganda campaign against the Islamic State as vicious,
predatory and cruel – most of which might be right – there is little
recognition of its genuine appeal, and even less of the joy it engenders. The
mainly young people who volunteer to fight for it unto death feel a joy that
comes from joining with comrades in a glorious cause, as well as a joy that
comes from satiation of anger and the gratification of revenge (whose
sweetness, says science, can be experienced
by brain and body much like other forms of happiness).

But
there is also a subliminal joy felt across the region for those who reject the
Islamic State’s murderous violence yet yearn for the revival of a Muslim
Caliphate and the end to a nation-state order that the Great Powers invented
and imposed. It is an order that has failed, and that the US, Russia and their
respective allies are trying willy-nilly to resurrect, and it is an order that
many in the region believe to be the root of their misery. What the ISIS
revolution is not, is a simple desire
to return to the ancient past. The idea that ISIS seeks a return to medieval
times makes no more sense than the idea that the US Tea Party wants to return
to 1776. “We are not sending people back to the time of the carrier pigeon,”
Abu Mousa, ISIS’s press officer in Raqqa, has said. “On the contrary, we will
benefit from development. But in a way that doesn’t contradict the religion.”

The
Caliphate seeks a new order based on a culture of today. Unless we recognise
these passions and aspirations, and deal with them using more than just
military means, we will likely fan those passions and lose another generation
to war and worse.

Treating
the Islamic State as merely a form of terrorism or violent extremism masks the
menace. All novel developments are “extremist” compared with what was the norm
before. What matters for history is whether these movements survive and thrive
against the competition. For our singularly self-predatory species, success has
depended on willingness to shed blood, including the sacrifice of one’s own,
not merely for family and tribe, wealth or status, but for some greater cause.
This has been especially true since the start of the Axial Age more than two
millennia ago. At that time, large-scale civilisations arose under the watchful
gaze of powerful divinities, who mercilessly punished moral transgressors –
thus ensuring that even strangers in multiethnic empires would work and fight
as one.

Call it
“god” or whatever secular ideology one prefers, including any of the great
modern salvational -isms:
colonialism, socialism, anarchism, communism, fascism and liberalism. In Leviathan (1651), Thomas Hobbes deemed
sacrifice for a transcendent ideal “the privilege of absurdity to
which no creature but man is subject.” Humans make their greatest commitments
and exertions, for ill or good, for the sake of ideas that give a sense of
significance. In an inherently chaotic universe, where humans alone recognise
that death is unavoidable, there is an overwhelming psychological impetus to
overcome this tragedy of cognition: to realise “why I am” and “who we are.”

In The Descent of Man
(1871), Charles Darwin cast this devotion as the virtue of “morality… the
spirit of patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage, and sympathy” with which
winning groups are better endowed in history’s spiralling competition for
survival and dominance. It is the sacred values, immune to material tradeoffs,
that bind us most. In any culture, an unwillingness to sell out one’s kin or
religious and political brotherhoods and motherlands is the line we usually
will not cross. Devotion to these values can drive successes which are out of
all proportion to expected outcomes.

Often
these values, tethered to beliefs such as our “God is great, bodiless but
omnipotent” or our “free markets are always wise,” are attributed to Providence
or Nature. They can never be verified by empirical evidence, and their meaning
is impossible to pin down. The term “sacred values” intuitively denotes
religious belief, as when land is holy, but can also include the “secularised
sacred” such as the “hallowed ground” of Gettysburg or the site of the attacks
on New York City of 11 September 2001 (9/11). The foundational beliefs of the
great ideological -isms and the quasi-religious notion of the Nation itself
have been ritualised in song and ceremony and sacrifice.

“Nothing
human is alien to me,” said Terence, the Roman slave who became a playwright
and gave my own field of anthropology an enduring credo: to empathise with
those most different from one’s own moral culture, without necessarily
sympathising. This is our call to comprehend. If we can only grasp why
otherwise normal humans would want to die killing masses of other humans who
have harmed no one, we might ourselves better avoid killing and being killed.

In our
liberal democracy, intentional mass bloodshed is considered evil, an expression
of human nature gone awry. But across most of human history and cultures,
violence against other groups was considered a moral virtue, a classification
necessary for killing masses of people innocent of harming others.

Besides,
brutal terror scares the hell out of enemies and fence-sitters. Kurdish leaders
told my research group that when 350-400 Islamic State fighters came in a
convoy of some 80 trucks to free Sunni captives (and massacre more than 600
Shia inmates) from Badoush prison in Iraq’s second largest city Mosul, a
relatively well-equipped Iraqi army of some 18,000 troops under US-trained
leaders immediately disappeared or ran away. When I asked one Arab Sunni
soldier embedded with a Kurdish Peshmerga force on the Mosul-Erbil front why
fellow soldiers fled, he simply said: “They wanted to keep their heads.”

The
shutdown of Brussels in the wake of the Paris attacks, or of Boston in the
aftermath of the marathon bombings in 2013, speaks to a comparable fear, and
contributes to an underlying lack of faith in our own societies and values,
something that terror attacks are designed to promote. During the Second World
War, not even the full might of the German Luftwaffe at the height of the Blitz
could compel the UK government and the people of London to cower so. Today,
mere mention of an attack on New York in an ISIS video has US officials
scurrying to calm the public. Media exposure, which is the oxygen of terror in
our age, not only amplifies the perception of danger but, in generating such
hysteria, makes the bloated threat to society real.

This is
especially true today because the media is mostly designed to titillate the
public rather than inform it. Thus, it has become child’s play for ISIS to turn
our own propaganda machine, the world’s mightiest, into theirs – boosting a
novel, highly potent jujitsu style of asymmetric warfare that we could counter with responsible restraint
and straight-up information, but we won’t.

The outcome
is dangerous and preposterous. The US Justice Department, with overwhelming
support from Congress and the media, now considers the common kitchen pressure
cooker to be a “weapon of mass destruction” if used for terrorism. This
ludicrously levels a cooking pot with a thermonuclear bomb that has many
billions of times greater destructive power. It trivialises true weapons of
mass destruction, making their acceptance more palatable and their use more
conceivable. In this present hyperreality, messaging is war by other means.
ISIS’s manipulation of our media creates a sense of foreboding of mass
destruction where it isn’t really possible, and at the same time obscures any
real future threat.

Asymmetric
operations involving spectacular killings to destabilise the social order is a
tactic that has been around as long as recorded history. Violent political and
religious groups routinely provoke their enemies into overreacting, preferably
by committing atrocities to get the others to drive in the sheep and collect
the wool.

When
the Romans occupied Judea following the death of Christ, the first revolts
involved Jewish youths throwing stones. The Jewish Zealots and especially their
most extreme variant, the Sicarii (“dagger
men”), amped things up, attacking Roman soldiers and Greek underlings in
self-sacrificial acts during public ceremonies, cranking the wheels of revenge
and retribution. The revolts ended with Rome expelling Jews from Judea, which
became “Syria Palaestina,” renamed for the Philistines who had previously
occupied the coastal areas. But the Jewish Diaspora spread its monotheistic
faith to the far corners of the world, seeding the universal missions of both
Christianity and Islam.

The
violence of the Islamic State, like the revolutionary violence of many who came
before, might be best characterised by what Edmund Burke called “the
sublime”: a willingness, indeed need and passion, for the “delightful
terror” of a sense of power, destiny, giving over to the infinite, ineffable
and unknown. “No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of
acting and reasoning as fear,” noted
Burke in On the Sublime and the Beautiful
(1756). “For fear being an apprehension of pain or death, it operates in a
manner that resembles actual pain. Whatever therefore is terrible, with regard
to sight, is sublime too…”

But for
terror to succeed in the service of the sacred and sublime, “obscurity seems in
general to be necessary,” Burke goes on. “Those despotic governments, which are
founded on the passions of men, and principally upon the passion of fear, keep
their chief as much as may be from the public eye.” Baghdadi, Prince of the
Faithful, surely fits that bill. More generally, as
France’s Charles De Gaulle noted in 1932, “there can be no
prestige without mystery, for familiarity breeds contempt”; and so “great
leaders have always carefully stage-managed their effects” to “concentrate all…
efforts on captivating men’s minds” in order that they might transcend
themselves to act for a glorious, group-defining cause.

The
sublime is also intensely physical and visceral, steeped in emotion and identity.
Any reasoning attached to it is the slave rather than driver of the passions.
There is no brainwashing, a leftover canard about allied soldiers during the
Korean War being broken like Pavlov’s dogs by Red China’s psychological
manipulation wizards. In Mein Kampf (1925), Adolf
Hitler declared that: “All great movements are popular movements, volcanic
eruptions of human passions and emotional sentiments, stirred either by the cruel
Goddess of Distress or by the firebrand of word hurled among the masses.” But
the word must be framed within the spectacular theatre of the sublime. When
Charlie Chaplin and the French film-maker René Clair together viewed Leni
Riefenstahl’s visual paean to National Socialism, Triumph
of the Will (1935), at a showing at the New York Museum of
Modern Art, Chaplin laughed but Clair was terror-stricken, fearing that, if it
were shown more widely, all might be lost in the West.

“O
soldiers of the Islamic State, continue to harvest soldiers,” Baghdadi
fulminated in 2014, “erupt volcanoes
of jihad everywhere” and “dismember [enemies] as groups and
individuals” to liberate mankind from the “satanic usury-based global system”
leached by “the Jews and crusaders” – an appeal that resonates with many, and
stirs at least some to atrocity.

An ICM
poll
in August 2014 suggested that a quarter of France’s young adults of all creeds,
aged 18 to 24, had at least a “somewhat favourable” attitude towards ISIS.
These specific results have not been replicated. But after the January 2015
Charlie Hebdo attacks, our research team set out to probe support in France and
Spain for values favouring and opposing those professed by the Islamic State:
for example, the strict Sharia of the Caliphate versus religious equality and
tolerance of dissent in democracies. Among young people in the hovels and grim
housing projects of the Paris banlieues,
we found fairly wide tolerance or support for ISIS’s values, and even for the
brutal actions carried out in their name. In Spain, among a large population
sample, we found little willingness to fight in order to defend democratic
values against onslaught.

It
matters little that, as J M Berger wrote last month in The Atlantic, “the
Islamic State’s ideological sympathisers make up less than 1 per cent of the
world’s population [and] that active, voluntary participants in its caliphate
project certainly make up less than a tenth of a percent.” Few, if any,
revolutionary vanguards in history achieved success by first capturing a
significant portion of the world’s population, or even the support of people in
their home regions. During the surge of US troops in Iraq, up to three-fourths
of the fighters were neutralised in Al-Qaeda’s Iraqi affiliate, which would
become ISIS, and an average of about a dozen high-value targets were eliminated
monthly for 15 consecutive months, including its top leader, Abu Musab
al-Zarqawi. Yet the organisation survived and the group went on to thrive
beyond all expectation amid the chaos of Syria’s civil war and Iraq’s factional
decomposition.

Just
since the Second World War, revolutionary movements have on
average emerged victorious with as little as 10 times less
firepower and manpower than the state forces against them. Behavioural research
in conflict zones indicates that sacred
values such as national liberation, God and Caliphate, mobilised
by devoted actors, empowers outsize commitment in initially low-power groups.
They are able to resist and often prevail against materially more powerful
armies that rely on standard incentives such as pay, promotion and punishment.

As history and empirical
studies show, what matters in revolutionary success is
commitment to cause and comrades. Even in the face of initial failures and
often devastating defeats, this can trump overwhelming material disadvantages.
In 1776, American colonists were frustrated not over economics but over a
perceived denial of truths “sacred
and undeniable” (Thomas Jefferson’s original words for the
Declaration of Independence). They were willing to sacrifice “our lives, our
fortunes and our sacred honour” against the world’s mightiest empire. Britain
sent a naval force of 30,000 men against the fledgling revolution in New York,
home to 20,000 inhabitants, and at first almost crushed George Washington’s
army. Haggard remnants of the colonial army were heading for home when
Washington addressed them with an inspired appeal: “You will render that
service to the cause of liberty… which you can probably never do under any
other circumstances.” The army fused together in the harsh winter at Valley
Forge, henceforth able to withstand any adversity.

But the
sort of liberal democracy initiated by the American Revolution has never been
very good at adjudicating across religious and ethnic boundaries, especially
when, as in much of the Middle East and Central Asia, such boundaries are
tribally based. Democracy took root in Britain’s American colonies, which had
the world’s highest standard
of living at the time and unprecedented opportunities for people
other than Native Americans and African slaves to strike out on their own into
virtually limitless territory, relatively free to realise their aspirations.

In
Western Europe, democracy gradually developed during the 19th century under the
tutelage of authoritarian rule. France’s Napoleon III not only continued
Napoleon Bonaparte’s promotion of cultural secularism and tolerance of
religious plurality, but also went on to introduce legislative elections,
permit organised political opposition, and legalise the right to strike. In
Europe, people were torn from ancestral lands (under laws closing the commons)
to work mostly in urban centres of the industrial revolution, bound in toil and
war to a novel, overarching notion of national identity.

In this
landscape, liberal institutions began to develop, enabling hitherto anonymous
strangers to work with one another and, if necessary, to fight together. These
institutions included free and universal education, a press accessible to a
wide range of information and argument, equality of all citizens before the law
(at least in principle), and a culture of growing tolerance towards minorities
and others. Without an overarching national identity and the liberal values and
institutions to sustain it, popular choice and elections lead only to a tyranny
of the majority, as both ancient Athens and post-Saddam Iraq confirm.

The
chasm between values is compounded by alternate historical arcs. The West and
the Arab and Muslim world have long lived mostly separate and parallel
histories. In the West, people generally believe history began with Ancient
Sumeria around the 26th Century BCE. Centred in the southern part of modern-day
Iraq, Sumeria was birthplace to written law and literature, and to Abraham and
his monotheistic creed. Civilisation then moved west to Greece and Rome. After
the fall of Rome, came the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Industrial
Revolution and the Enlightenment, the first political revolutions, the world
wars and the Cold War. Human rights and democracy became triumphant and
seemingly inevitable.

The
Arab and Muslim world also begins with Sumeria but, until the world wars, Rome,
Greece and the rest were peripheral. Christian Europe was the dark continent;
Muslim heroes, myths, legends and references were all basically different. Sure
there is Moses and Alexander and Jesus, but their profiles in Islam are
distinct: Musa’s (Moses’s) life paralleled Mohammed’s and foretold the
Prophet’s coming; Iskandar (Alexander) or Dhul-Qarnayn (Arabic for “The
Two-Horned One”) was a religious figure to whom Allah gave great power and the
ability to build a wall of civilisation to provisionally keep out the forces of
chaos and evil. And Isa, or Jesus, was Allah’s righteous messenger, not his
son, who did not die on the cross but, like Mohammed, was raised to heaven.

All of
the European political imports and even nationalism itself (except maybe for
Turkey, Egypt and Iran, which are still more built around ethnicity and faith
than national identity per se) have failed in the Middle East, and miserably
so. People are longing for something in their history, in their traditions,
with their heroes and their morals; and the Islamic State, however brutal and
repugnant to us and even to most in the Arab-Muslim world, is speaking directly
to that.

Yet the
US and Western powers don’t seem to recognise that revival. The hackneyed
solutions amount to a tired call to shore up the broken nation-state system
imposed in the aftermath of the First World War by the European victors, Great
Britain and France, and a reaffirmation of “moderate Islam,” which appeals to
young people’s longings for adventure, glory, ideals and significance even less
than does the eternal promise of shopping malls.

Still,
the popular notion of a “clash of civilisations” between Islam and the West is
woefully misleading. Violent extremism represents not the resurgence of
traditional cultures, but their collapse, as young people unmoored from millennial
traditions flail about in search of a social identity that gives personal
significance and glory. This is the dark side of globalisation. Individuals
radicalise to find a firm identity in a flattened world. In this new reality,
vertical lines of communication between the generations are replaced by
horizontal peer-to-peer attachments that can cut across the globe.

As I
told the UN Security Council this spring, what inspires the most lethal
assailants in the world today is not so much the Quran or religious teachings
but rather a thrilling cause and a call to action that promises glory and
esteem in the eyes of friends. Foreign volunteers for the Islamic State are
often youth in transitional stages in their lives – immigrants, students,
people between jobs and before finding their mates. Having left their homes,
they seek new families of friends and fellow travellers to find purpose and
significance.

France’s
Centre for the Prevention of Sectarian Drift Related to Islam estimates that 80
per cent come from non-religious families; West
Point’s Center for Combating Terrorism finds that their average age
is 25. For the most part, they have no traditional religious education and are “born
again” to religion through the jihad. About one in four, often the fiercest
followers, are converts. Self-seekers who have found their way to jihad reach
out through private gatherings or the internet. They might be people who feel
uncomfortable with binge-drinking or casual sex, or have seen their parents
humiliated by employers or the government, or their sisters insulted for
wearing a headscarf. Most do not follow through to join the jihad, but some do.
More than 80 per cent who join the Islamic State do so through peer-to-peer
relationships, mostly with friends and sometimes family. Very
few join in mosques or through recruitment by anonymous strangers.

What we
know about the Paris attackers fits this pattern. As with the perpetrators of
the 2004 Madrid train bombings and the 2005 London Underground bombings,
several of the principal plotters in the January and November Paris attacks
lived for a time in the same neighbourhood, several enlisted friends and family
members, and some moved in the same criminal networks and spent time together
in jail.

In
France and elsewhere in Europe, many of these young people feel disenfranchised
by both the country they live in and their country of origin. Unlike the US,
Europe was not built to absorb immigrants. In the US, Muslim immigrants attain
parity or surpass the average American in wealth and education in the
first generation. In Europe, they are much more likely to be
poorer than the average citizen and poorer still after
the second generation, a legacy of decolonisation left largely to fester
unattended.

In
France, 7 to 8 per cent of the total population is Muslim, the largest
percentage of the total population of any state in Europe; at the same time, up
to 70 per
cent
of the prison population is Muslim, contributing significantly to an underclass
ripe for radicalisation. One 24-year-old who joined Jabhat al-Nusra in Syria,
described his experience in Germany:

They
teach us to work hard to buy a nice car and nice clothes but that isn’t
happiness. I was a third-class human because I wasn’t integrated into a
corrupted system. But I didn’t want to be a street gangster. So, I and my
friends decided to go around and invite people to join Islam. The other Muslim
groups in the city just talk. They think a true Muslim state will just rain
down from heaven on them without fighting.

Most
European volunteers join ISIS rather than Nusra because “they believe the
Caliphate is here today and there’s no need to wait for tomorrow.” Yet many
volunteers for the Islamic State are far from marginal in their home countries.
As one family physician wrote to me earlier this year:

During
the past few months, two groups of medical students from the University [of
Medical Sciences and Technology in Khartoum, Sudan] have fled to the Levant in
order to join ISIS. The families of those students have had difficulties coping
with their loss. It was almost grievousness of death. The students who left
from our university… are well-funded by their parents (higher middle class with
multi-background). I find difficulty identifying the factors that led those
smart, straight-A students, to [ISIS]. Could it be lack of identity? Could it
be the universities’ fault? Could it be… the family’s lack of influence?

A
banker from Mosul recounted:

Daesh
fighters came into the bank and our staff was terrified. They offered to help
in any way. An Algerian, about 25, polite, asked only to be led to our
computers. In a short time he downloaded all of our bank’s transactions. He
said that he came to the Islamic State to put his education in computer
engineering to good use.

The
Caliphate is an attractor to all of these young people, providing purpose and
freedom from what they have come to see as the vice of a meaningless, material
world. The Islamic State Caliphate is supposed to conform to the pure, Salafi
vision of the Prophet’s initial followers (ie of the salaf, or “forebears”). It is an imperial enterprise that demands
offensive jihad, or holy war, against the infidel (kafir), as an “individual obligation” (fard al-’ayn) of everyone who belongs to the “House of Islam” (Dar al-Islam).

Adherents
of this pure Caliphate are violently opposed to the idea of greater jihad as an
inner spiritual struggle. They consider this bogus notion of jihad to be the
heart of the Sufi heresy introduced in the later Abbasid Caliphate, which
corrupted the pure Arab-led form of the Caliphate and led to its decay and
downfall.

At the
East Asia summit in Singapore last April, some people insisted that the
Caliphate was nothing more than a myth masking traditional power politics. Our
research in Europe and North Africa shows this to be a dangerous misconception.
The Caliphate has re‑emerged as a mobilising cause
in the minds of many Muslims, and even has some appeal to Muslims who favour
interfaith cooperation. “I am against the violence of Al‑Qaeda
and ISIS,” said an imam in Barcelona who helps to run an interfaith dialogue
initiative with Christians and Jews, “but they have put our predicament in
Europe and elsewhere on the map. Before, we were just ignored. And the
Caliphate… We dream of it like the Jews long dreamed of Zion. Maybe it can be a
federation, like the European Union, of Muslim peoples. The Caliphate is here,
in our hearts, even if we don’t know what real form it will finally take.”

Whatever
form it assumes, we can be sure it will be rooted in the history and culture of
the Arab states, not the West. That perspective includes the reality of Muslim
dominance of middle Eurasia until the European industrial revolution and a
rejection of the Western world order, be it liberal democracy or socialism,
imposed after the Ottoman collapse in the early 20th century.

Perhaps
above all else, the Islamic State aims to put an end to Sykes-Picot, the
neocolonial order that Britain and France imposed on the Arab provinces of the
Ottoman Empire after the First World War. In the spring of 2014, when ISIS
bulldozed the border markers between Iraq and Syria, it generated a sense of
liberation and joy for many across the region and beyond. Unlike the US and the
other great powers, including Russia and China, many people in the region do
not consider the current mayhem to result from failed states that now must be
revived and reinforced at whatever cost, but to emanate from the expedient
fictions that created those states in the first place.

Revolutions
past and present are moral events. Deteriorating or rapidly changing economic
and social conditions can initiate a cascading series of events to produce a
political crisis. But this leads to revolutionary challenge to the prevailing
order only when action becomes motivated by a new moral order, and when seizure
of state power can enforce the “sacred values” that define that order.

In
Egypt, the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood – the militant Islamist movement
that became a political party – had been on the rise well before the Arab
Spring. Although the Brotherhood initially refused to participate, the disunity
of secular forces allowed it to rush in and fill the moral void after that
revolution. But unlike the founders of the Islamic Republic of Iran who purged
the army, controlled the bazaari (the
urban commercial class) and took root in the rural religious population,
Egypt’s leaders (as they told me at the time) believed that the army, economy
and affection of the people would fall into line if the Brotherhood’s
leadership first managed to control the messaging and Ministry of Information.

By
contrast, the Islamic State has moved swiftly and ruthlessly to impose a
new-old ethos among Arab Sunnis in the war-torn wastelands of the Middle East,
and promises total war against the “satanic” morality of Iran and the Shia and
their helpers (including the US, its allies, and Russia) in a mortal struggle
for the Muslim soul and ultimately for the salvation of all mankind.

Historical
analogies are always of limited usefulness, but they are also one of the only
means by which we can make sense of what is new, or at least recognise where
true novelty begins.

There
are striking historical parallels in the history of modern revolutions ever
since the Jacobin faction of French revolutionaries, led by Maximilien Robespierre,
introduced the political concept of “terror”
and decapitation by guillotine; this extreme measure for the defence of
democracy was seen as a divine form of violence. For a decade, at the end of
the 18th century, the French Revolution consumed its own like bloodied sharks,
all the while fighting a fractious coalition of great powers that sought to
destroy it. Yet it thrived. United and transformed into an imperial mission to
reform and save humankind – as all revolutions since have endeavoured to do –
revolutionary forces conquered nearly all of Europe before the Empire’s fall.
And ever after, commitment to “total war” in the service of some indomitable
moral and spiritual force has continued to inspire nearly all revolutions.

A
series of revolutions inspired by a vision of social equality and universal
brotherhood swept through Europe in 1848. Their failure has many parallels to
what, in hindsight, is the wishfully misnamed (by mostly Western commentators)
Arab Spring. Beginning in Sicily in January of 1848 and cascading throughout
much of Europe by March and April, from Denmark to the borders of Russia, the
revolutions spread through social networks and word of mouth even more widely
and rapidly than did the Arab Spring through social and commercial media. Like
the secular forces leading the Arab Spring, those of the 1848 revolutions
showed little political unity or practical knowledge about how to create a new
moral order, upon which the survival and success of every revolution depends.

Reactionary
nationalist elites in concert with the Church muscled into that gap, creating a
new morality of nationalism with all the quasi-religious trappings of flags,
ceremonies, anthems, parades and imaginary kinship symbolising common roots in
blood, soil and ethnicity. This new political morality aimed to bind to
traditional elites the loyalty of peasants and workers who might otherwise
again aspire to break down social hierarchies and political boundaries in the
name of universal brotherhood. The 20th century’s titanic global struggle
between fascism and communism is part of this legacy. It is far too early to
tell what the ultimate legacy of the failure of the Arab Spring will be.

The
current rivalry between Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State echoes that between the
anarchists and Bolshevists. Beginning in Russia in the 1870s as a movement
against the power of the state and capital, the anarchist movement soon spread
throughout Europe and on to the Americas. Between 1881 and 1900, assassins
closely linked to the anarchist movement had killed the Czar of Russia, the
President of France, the Prime Minister of Spain, the King of Italy and the
Empress of Austria. In September 1901, the anarchist Leon Czolgosz assassinated
the US President William McKinley.

The
Great Powers considered anarchism to pose the largest threat to the internal
political and economic order, and to international stability. In the face of repeated
anarchist attacks randomly targeting Parisians in “bourgeois” cafés,
theatres and the like, French leaders and the popular press demanded that the
French people “awaken” and “unify” to fight a scourge that threatened
civilisation itself. The political (and to some extent social and economic)
consequences from this first wave of modern terror were similar in many
respects to those of the 9/11 attacks. Teddy Roosevelt made the defeat of
anarchism an overriding mission of his administration: “When compared with the
suppression of anarchy, every other question sinks into insignificance. The
anarchist is the enemy of humanity, the enemy of all mankind; and his is a
deeper degree of criminality than any other.”

But
Roosevelt didn’t restrict the fight against terrorism to anarchists alone. He
expanded the war on anarchy into an imperial mission to intervene in any
country around the world if necessary to protect it from foreign evil and
preserve it from chaos. “Chronic wrongdoing,” he said, “or an impotence which
results in a general loosening of the ties of civilised society, may in
America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilised
nation, and may lead the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases
of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police
power.” Most tellingly, the war against anarchy and terror helped to justify
the brutal repression of an ethnic Muslim (Moro) insurgency against US rule in
the Philippines.

Despite
political and popular belief in the existence of an “Anarchist Central,” there
never really was anything of the sort. As with Al-Qaeda, the anarchist movement
was largely a decentralised movement of volunteers led by fairly well-off and
well-educated folk. (Indeed, ever since the anarchist movement, revolutions
have been initially led by a plurality of medical students, doctors and
engineers, now mostly computer engineers, who have hands-on practical knowledge
about how to accomplish things, as well as dedicated commitment to a course of
action that requires willingness to delay gratification.)

What
ultimately killed off the anarchist movement as a geopolitical force were the
Bolshevists, who knew much better how to manage a shared political ambition
through military and territorial management; they were also, on the whole, much
more ruthless. In a series of recent interviews with Jabhat al-Nusra fighters
from the Aleppo and Dara regions of Syria, it has become increasingly clear
that ISIS is eating Al-Qaeda in much the same way that the Bolshevists co-opted
and practically annihilated the anarchist movement. Even some Nusra fighters
echoed this sentiment, conceding that Daesh, or the Islamic State, is better
led, organised and supplied, rooted in territory, and more uncompromising and brutal
in action. As one Nusra fighter lamented: “Daesh has taken our power and
financial resources from us, their media is more powerful, and so we are like a
fish out of water.”

Opponents
of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party argued that the Nazis were
neither a party of workers nor socialists. Today, we are told again and again
that Islamic State is “neither a state nor Islamic,” and that when we use the
term “Islamic State,” it only “feeds into its hands.” In fact, the contrary is
true: believing that refusing to call the Islamic State by its own name can
somehow delegitimise it is only self-deluding. (A rose, or a National
Socialist, by any other name is still what or who it is.)

In
fact, there is a deeper
connection between the Nazi movement and the Islamic State, an association that
I notedsome
time ago. George Orwell, in his review
of Mein Kampf in 1940, descried the
essence of the problem:

Hitler
knows… that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours,
hygiene … and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently,
want struggle and self-sacrifice… Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a
more grudging way, have said to people “I offer you a good time,” Hitler has
said to them “I offer you struggle, danger and death,” and as a result a whole
nation flings itself at his feet.

Man for
man, the German army outfought all allied armies by any measure. In classical
military doctrine, about a 30 per cent loss in a fighting unit usually leads to
entropy so, when that degree of destruction is confirmed, the victorious army
moves on to the next task. (This was basically how the Israeli Army fought the
Six-Day War in 1967.) But German units often suffered in excess of 50 per cent
loss and held fast, fought bravely and sometimes knowingly to the death in
defence of a devoutly believed cause, however horrible it might seem.

Post-war social-psychological
studies reveal that the German soldier believed in what he was doing, and
fought for a cause as much as for comrades, whereas there is little evidence
that the Allies fought for democracy or communism, despite Hollywood and Soviet
propaganda. The German armies were destroyed only by the massive superiority of
US firepower and by the massive manpower of more than 20 million Russians given
over to slaughter. Perhaps it will come to something like that with the Islamic
State. But, for now, the means arrayed against this dynamic revolutionary
movement look feeble, and what the US government grandly dubs the “global ISIL
coalition” of 65
nations seems a very tenuous, if not fatuous, thing (with several of its
members ever-ready to stick knives into one another’s back).

Of
course, “wars are won in the material world,” a truism that Berger duly notes
in The Atlantic, but a spiritual
commitment to cause and comrades conveys great advantage, all things being
equal. As 14th century Arab historian Ibn Khaldun first noted, comparing Muslim
dynasties in North Africa with similar military might, long-term differences in
success “have their origin in religion… group feeling (asabiyah) [wherein] individual desires come together in agreement
[and] mutual cooperation and support flourish.”

In
remarks last year, the US President Barack Obama endorsed
the judgment
of his Director of National Intelligence: “We underestimated the Viet Cong… we
underestimated ISIL and overestimated the fighting capability of the Iraqi
army… It boils down to predicting the will to fight, which is an imponderable.”

Our
research suggests quite the opposite: predicting who is willing to fight and
who isn’t, and why, is quite ponderable and amenable to scientific study. Thus,
in our recent interviews and psychological experiments on the frontlines with
Kurdish fighters of the Peshmerga and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, with
captured ISIS fighters, and with Nusra fighters in Syria, we have a good
initial indication of willingness to fight. Two principal factors interact to
predict readiness to make costly sacrifices (go to prison, lose one’s life,
have one’s family suffer, etc).

The
first factor is perception of relative commitment of one’s own group versus
those of the enemy to a sacred cause. This can be measured through
behavioural experiments and tracked via neural imaging to show four elements.
1) Disregard for material incentives or disincentives: attempts to buy people
off (“carrots”) from their cause or punish them for embracing it through
sanctions (“sticks”) don’t work, and even tend to backfire. 2) Blindness to
exit strategies: people cannot even conceive of the possibility of abandoning
their sacred values or relaxing their commitment to the cause. 3) Immunity to
social pressure: it matters not how many people oppose your sacred values, or
how close to you they are in other matters. 4) Insensitivity to discounting: in
most everyday affairs, distant events and objects have less significance for
people than things in the here and now; but matters associated with sacred
values, regardless of how far removed in time or space, are more important and
motivating than mundane concerns, however immediate.

The
second factor in predicting willingness to fight is the degree of fusion with
one’s comrades. Consider, by way of illustration, a pair of circles where one
circle represents “me” and a larger circle represents “the group.” In one set
of experiments, we asked participants to consider five possible pairings: in
the first pairing, the “me” circle and “the group” circle don’t touch; in the
second pairing, the circles touch; in the third they slightly overlap; in the
fourth they half overlap; and in the fifth pairing, the “me” circle is entirely
contained within “the group” circle. People who choose the last pairing think
and behave in ways entirely different from those who choose any of the other
pairings. They experience what social psychologists call “identity fusion,” wedding
their personal identity (“who I am”) to a unique collective identity (“who we
are”). Such total
fusion demonstrably leads to a sense of group invincibility and a
willingness of each and every individual in the group to sacrifice for each and
every other.

Only
among the Kurds do we
find commitment to the sacred cause of “Kurdeity” (their own term) and
fusion with fellow Kurdish fighters comparable to commitment to cause and
comrade among fighters of the Islamic State.

Willingness
to fight and make costly sacrifices is also strongly associated with
perceptions of physical formidability on the battlefield and, even more
importantly, with spiritual strength. My research group found that Nusra
fighters consider Iran (by which they also mean Hezbollah) to be the most
formidable foe in Syria, both in terms of physical and spiritual strength, but
they consider the Islamic State growing to parity on both scores. These
Al-Qaeda combatants consider the US to be of middling formidability, and the
Syrian and Iraqi armies to be relatively weak physically, and spiritually
worthless, and thus an inconsequential enemy in the long run.

To be
sure, not all who fight with the Islamic State are committed zealots. When we
asked captured Islamic State fighters in Iraq: “What is Islam?” they answered: “My
life,” but they had little knowledge of the Quran or hadith, and none of Muslim
history. Their sense of religion was fused with the vision of a caliphate that
kills or subjugates any nonbeliever, but their conversion was not complete. In
the face of almost sure execution by the Kurds, most were ready to recant. In
one conversation picked up by a Kurdish walkie-talkie, a fighter with a local
accent asked for help: “My brother has been killed. I am surrounded. Help me
take his body away.” The reply: “Perfect, you will join him soon in Paradise.”
The fighter retorted: “Come for me. This Paradise, I don’t want.”

Support
might be conditional, but the demands of ISIS are not. The Islamic State will
say to a local sheikh: “Give us 20 young men or we loot your village.” To a
father with three sons, they will say: “Give us one or we take your daughter as
a bride for our men.” Last March, we were told of a girl of 15 who was “married”
and “divorced” 15 times in a single night to a troop of Islamic State fighters
(under some readings of Sharia
law, “divorce” is as easy as repeating “I divorce you” three times, which
makes it easy to cast rape as marriage).

In the
face of such brutality, wavering supporters of the Islamic State could well
rally to an Arab Sunni force, possibly allied with the Kurds. By contrast,
foreign fighters often stand their ground, no matter what. As the chief of the
Kirkuk police station housing the prisoners put it: “The foreign fighters are
the most dangerous and fearless. They fight to win and they fight to die. They
believe in what they are doing and will not surrender.” One 25-year-old Nusra
fighter who originally joined ISIS but grew tired of “blowing up innocent
civilians” confirms the Kurdish police chief’s take on foreign volunteers who
desire struggle and self-sacrifice more than anything in life:

As a
teen, I just wanted to play football and video games. I used to love reading
fiction books. Looking back on my thoughts, it seems that my mind was too
focused and distracted by the mundane: studying, getting a good job,
socialising, having fun and being a family man. The concept of jihad was
something scary at the time, something of sacrifice and hardship and impossible
to pull off. It wasn’t long before I was informed about the concept of
martyrdom (shuhada)… Immediately, my
mind would conjure images of two armies fighting each other on an open plane.
Warriors wielding their swords and riding along on beautiful horses, my mind in
overdrive with thoughts of fighting in the way of Allah and attaining
martyrdom. I never really watched much jihadi propaganda online and I was so
eager to get to Syria I walked in blind with two brothers I was with, who were
locals from the UK… [to] rid society of its many filths and return the Earth to
a state of purity where the law of God is supreme and surpasses everything
else, jealous about brothers who had been killed fighting in the way of Allah.

The
core strategy used by the Islamic State to attract supporters and unhinge
opponents is hardly a mystery, although few people engaged in policy and
decision-making seem to have taken note. Its manifesto for action, a required
playbook for the Islamic State’s emirs (religious, political and military
leaders), is The
Management of Savagery/Chaos. It was written over a decade ago, under
the pseudonym Abu Bakr Naji, for the Mesopotamian wing of Al-Qaeda that would
become ISIS. Think of the recent massacres in Paris, Beirut or Bamako, and then
consider some of the book’s axioms.

1) Hit
soft targets: “Diversify and widen the vexation strikes against the
Crusader-Zionist enemy in every place in the Islamic world, and even outside of
it if possible, so as to disperse the efforts of the alliance of the enemy and
thus drain it to the greatest extent possible.”

2)
Strike when potential victims have their guard down to maximise fear in general
populations and drain their economies: “If a tourist resort that the Crusaders
patronise… is hit, all of the tourist resorts in all of the states of the world
will have to be secured by the work of additional forces, which are double the
ordinary amount, and a huge increase in spending.”

3)
Capture the rebelliousness of youth, their energy and idealism, and their
readiness for self-sacrifice, while fools preach moderation and avoidance of
risk: “Motivate crowds drawn from the masses to fly to the regions which we
manage, particularly the youth… [For] the youth of the nation are closer to the
innate nature [of humans] on account of the rebelliousness within them, which…
the inert Islamic groups [only try to suppress].”

4) Draw
the West as deeply and actively as possible into the quagmire: “Work to expose
the weakness of America’s centralised power by pushing it to abandon the media
psychological war and war by proxy until it fights directly.” Ditto for
America’s allies.

“The
Extinction of the Grayzone,” a 12-page editorial published in ISIS’s online
magazine Dabiq
in early 2015, describes the twilight area occupied by most Muslims between
good and evil – in other words, between the Caliphate and the Infidel, which
the “blessed operations of September 11” brought into relief. The editorial
quotes Osama bin Laden, for whom ISIS is the true heir: “The world today is
divided. Bush spoke the truth when he said, ‘Either you are with us or you are
with the terrorists,’” with the actual “terrorist” being the Western Crusaders.
Now, “the time had come for another event to… bring division to the world and
destroy the Grayzone.”

In
reality, last month’s Paris attack was just the latest, ever more effective,
instalment for fomenting chaos in Europe, just as recent attacks in Turkey and
Beirut sought to instigate more savagery and chaos in the Middle East. A
welcome to Syrian refugees would clearly represent a winning response to this
strategy, whereas wholesale rejection of refugees just as clearly represents a
losing response to ISIS. We might wish to celebrate diversity and tolerance in
the grayzone, but the general trend in Europe and the majority of the US
political establishment and population is to collude in erasing it.

In
Europe, the rise of radical Islam has coincided with the revival of xenophobic
ethno-nationalist movements. The two trends in tandem owe in part to Europe’s low
replacement rate of 1.6 children per couple, creating the need for immigration
to maintain a productive workforce. At a time where there has never been less
tolerance for immigration, there has never been more need.

In
areas under or adjacent to Islamic State control, the general populations
likely do not support either the Islamic State or the Western (and now also
Russian) forces arrayed against it. They are not zealots or samurai, and do not
want to die as martyrs. ISIS knows this and entices its enemies to attack the
population centres that it controls, even though the ability of ISIS to diffuse
its highly mobile military assets and personnel in a semi-nomadic regime
without borders means that there is little infrastructure available to target.
Mostly, then, the local populations suffer. Although many would run away from
both ISIS and the bombs of its enemies if given half a chance, they cannot move
and must exclusively depend for protection on the black banner, where evidence
of gray can be punished with death. And history shows that aerial bombing
campaigns generally harden populations against the bombers, whatever the
regime.

In
Syria and much of Iraq more generally, there is hardly any grayzone left,
especially for youth torn from home and forced to join a warrior group or leave
for limbo as a refugee.

In the
West, the imminent death of ISIS has been greatly oversold. ISIS is destined to
fail on its own, in part because it is a “desperately poor nation trying to
fight a three-front war,” in part because of a “noxious ideology of governance”
as two professors recently argued in Politico.
The authors, the economist Eli Berman at the University of California, San
Diego and the political scientist Jacob Shapiro at Princeton, invoke the doomed
destiny of the current Zimbabwe State and the collapse of the Soviet Union to
bolster their argument.

But
historical precedence and present evidence don’t encourage their point of view.
Poverty, multi-front wars and extreme or exclusive ideologies can also end in
revolutionary triumph or lasting influence, as with Republican France and
possibly the Islamic Republic of Iran. The authors’ contention that “as the
Soviet Union was to communism, so ISIL is to jihadism” might be on the mark.
However, before the Islamic State’s inherent contradictions confine it to the
dustbin of history, there are likely miles and miles of grief to go. Before the
revolutionary flame burns itself out, it can also burn away much in its path,
and profoundly reshape the region and beyond.

The
9/11 attacks cost between $400,000 and $500,000 to execute, whereas the
military and security response by the US and its allies is in the order of 10 million times
that figure. On a strictly cost-benefit basis, this violent movement has been
wildly successful, beyond even Bin Laden’s original imagination, and is
increasingly so. Herein lies the full measure of jujitsu-style asymmetric
warfare. After all, who could claim that we are better off than before, or that
the overall danger is declining?

This alone
should inspire a radical change in our counter-strategies. Yet, like the
proverbial notion of insanity being the repetition of the same mistakes while
expecting different results, our side continues to focus almost exclusively on
security and military responses. Some of these responses have proven hopelessly
ineffective from the outset, such as relying on the Iraqi, Afghan or Free
Syrian armies.

By
contrast, there is precious little attention to social and psychological needs.
I don’t mean to suggest that we solve things by offering potential jihadists
better jobs. A still-unpublished report by the World Bank shows no reliable
relationship between job production and violence reduction. If people are ready
to sacrifice their lives, then it is not likely that offers of greater material
advantages will stop them.

Instead,
we must meet their psychological and aspirational needs. In just one example of
how we fall short, the US State Department continues to send off-target tweets
through negative mass messaging in its ineffectual “Think Again Turn Away”
campaign. Compare this to ISIS, which can spend hundreds of hours trying to
enlist single individuals. Through its social media, the sophisticated Islamic
State learns how personal frustrations and grievances can fit into a universal
theme of persecution against all Muslims, and then translates anger and
unrealised aspiration into moral outrage. Some
estimates have ISIS managing upwards of 70,000 Twitter and Facebook
accounts, with hundreds of thousands of followers, and sending approximately
90,000 texts daily. ISIS also pays close attention to the pop songs, video
clips, action movies and television shows that garner high ratings among youth,
and use them as templates to tailor their own messages.

By
contrast, the US government has few operatives who personally engage with youth
before they become a problem. The FBI is pressing to get out of the messy
business of prevention and just stick to criminal investigation. “No one wants
to own any of this,” one group from the US National Counterterrorism Center
told us. And public diplomacy efforts don’t quite get that hackneyed appeals to
“moderation” fall flat on restless and idealistic youths seeking adventure,
glory and significance. As one imam and former Islamic State facilitator told
us in Jordan:

The
young who came to us were not to be lectured at like witless children; they are
for the most part understanding and compassionate, but misguided. We have to
give them a better message, but a positive one to compete. Otherwise, they will
be lost to Daesh.

Local
grass-roots approaches have had better luck in pulling people away. The United Network of Young Peacebuilders has had
remarkable results in convincing young Taliban in Pakistan that enemies can be
friends, and then encouraging those so convinced to convince others. But this
will not challenge the broad attraction of the Islamic State for young people
from nearly 90 nations and every walk of life. The lessons of local successes
must be shared with government, and ideas allowed to bubble up before they boil
over. To date, no such conduit exists, and young people with good ideas have
few institutional channels to develop them.

Even if
good ideas find ways to emerge from youth and obtain institutional support for
their development to application, they still need intellectual help to persuade
the public to adopt them. But where are the intellectuals to do this? Among
Muslim leadership I’ve interviewed around the world, I listen to PowerPoint
presentations intoning on “dimensions of ideology, grievance, and group
dynamics,” notions that originate exclusively with Western “terrorism experts”
and think tanks. When I ask: “What ideas come from your own people?”, I’m told
in moments of candour, as I was most recently by a Muslim leadership council in
Singapore, that: “We don’t have many new ideas and we can’t agree on those we
have.”

And
where among our own current or coming generation are the intellectuals who
might influence the moral principles, motivations and actions of society
towards a just and reasonable way through the morass? In academia, you’ll find
few willing to engage with power. They thus render themselves irrelevant and
morally irresponsible by leaving the field of power entirely to those they
censure. Accordingly, politicians pay them little heed, and the public couldn’t
care less, often with good reason. For example, in the immediate aftermath of
the 9/11 attacks, many in my own field of anthropology principally occupied
themselves with the critique of empire: is the US a classic empire or “empire
light?” This was arguably a justifiable academic exercise, and perhaps a useful
reflection in the long run, but hardly helpful in the context of a country
moving fast to open-ended war, with all the agony and suffering that extended
wars inevitably bring.

Responsible
intellectual endeavour in the public sphere was once a vibrant part of our
public life: not to promote “certain, clear, and strong” action, as Martin
Heidegger wrote in support of Hitler, but to generate just and reasonable
possibilities and pathways for consideration. Now this sphere is largely
abandoned to the Manichean preachings of blogging pundits, radio talk-show
hosts, product-pushing podcasters, and television evangelicals. These people
rarely do what responsible intellectuals ought to do. “The intellectual,”
explained France’s Raymond
Aron 60 years ago, “must try never to forget the arguments of the
adversary, or the uncertainty of the future, or the faults of one’s own side,
or the underlying fraternity of ordinary men everywhere.”

Civilisations
rise and fall on the vitality of their cultural ideals, not their material
assets alone. History shows that most societies have sacred values for which
their people would passionately fight, risking serious loss and even death
rather than compromise. Our research suggests this is so for many who join
ISIS, and for many Kurds who oppose them on the frontlines. But, so far, we
find no comparable willingness among the majority of youth that we sample in
Western democracies. With the defeat of fascism and communism, have their lives
defaulted to the quest for comfort and safety? Is this enough to ensure the
survival, much less triumph, of values we have come to take for granted, on
which we believe our world is based? More than the threat from violent jihadis,
this might be the key existential issue for open societies today.